So, I finished playing through both of the Disney Infinity 3.0 play sets I bought during the post-Christmas sales, which left me with only two PS4 games on the backlog. One of them is Alien: Isolation, a game that I spent several hours with shortly after it came out, and lost a couple of those hours due to save point spacing.

I elected, therefore, to start “Warriors Orochi 3: Ultimate”, which is a heck of a name to saddle any game with.

While I’ve technically played a musou game before, it was Dynasty Warriors: Gundam, so I was able to more-or-less follow what was going. WO3U is, by comparison, SUPER dense and full of all kinds of characters from early games, most of whom have really difficult-to-remember Chinese names. It is being something of a slog to get going.

The real draw, of course, after playing both Ninja Gaiden Sigma games last year, is that I can eventually unlock the Ninja Gaiden characters and use them to cut huge swaths through fairly poorly-animated and rendered giant armies. I’m not too proud to admit that.

On the plus side, even though I can’t remember anyone’s NAME (the main three characters are, in order, “Spear Guy”, “Baggy Pants Sword Guy”, and “Weird Spinny Weapon Kid”), the setting is kind of neat. The schtick is that they’ve been fighting a war against overwhelming odds for YEARS, and they finally manage to launch a desperate strike against the heart of the enemy… but they lose, and just as they’re about to get wiped out, a woman (“Mysterious Floating Chick”) shows up to give them a chance to travel back in time to earlier battles and undo their mistakes. As you save people from dying, they get added to your roster and you can go back into THEIR timelines to save even more people.

Mysterious Floating Chick is named Kaguya, by the way, and she has the only name I can remember because three terms of Japanese Literature were good for SOMETHING.

One nice gimmick is that, since you are constantly recruiting people and it would be terrible if they all started off at level one, you bank XP during missions that you can use to boost new characters. By the time I DO unlock the Ninja Gaiden crew, I should be able to bring them right up to standards. 🙂

Oh, short note about the Disney Infinity playsets: The Force Awakens one was REALLY good, to the point where I kept replaying several missions to try to improve my scores on them, and that’s very unusual for me. The “Rise Against the Empire” set, on the other hand, opened with a GREAT level where you run around Tatooine murdering sandpeople and punting Jawas into the Sarlacc Pit, and then went seriously downhill from there. It pains me to say it, but if you’re looking at buying the game, maybe skip the Episode IV-VI set unless you just want the figurines.

I’m tempted by the Inside Out playset if it drops to 20 bucks or so (I’ve already seen it at 25, so it’s just a matter of time), and don’t know enough about Clone Wars to know if I care for that set.